Tag Archive: C

We have built a reporting tool for the Clover ePos which creates a text report for printing using the built-in receipt printer. The app has been through numerous iterations and the code which specifically handles alignment has always bugged me. The task seems trivial to the human mind, but when trying to code seems to throw a lot of curve balls! Here are some examples of the anticipated behavior;

So we revisited it, and I hope have now built a simpler “one size fits all” (not exactly, but considerably less conditional than before). The code accepts a string with pipe separators to determine alignment (refer to the diagram above for a bit more info) and spits out a string padded accordingly;

The receipt printer automatically wraps the string but we use a small method to split the string into chunks and add carriage returns/new lines for ease of use. Initially, this too was cumbersome (with loops and ifs etc), but we found a more elegant solution (avoiding re-inventing the wheel and reducing the number of lines of code- though I appreciate a loop is still occurring under the hood);

I work with a number of systems which have functionality gaps and/or need a simpler (quicker) interface for data entry. The solution is essentially a SQL view (or stored procedure) with a simple grid (excel like) front-end. If any data needs to be captured not currently handled by the system a custom table is created to hold the fields.

My previous Excel based solution works rather well, but is starting to show it’s age. I am now beta testing a web based solution i have built;

The application is extremely simple to configure- enter the SQL to retrieve & update the data;

And list the columns with some attributes (ReadOnly, Hidden, Title, Width etc);

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The first project I backed on Kickstarter was delivered some time back but I’ve only recently gotten around to trying to do something with it.

I have a bunch of JeeNodes from JeeLabs and wanted to use them as a starting point so read a few articles about getting the RFM12B on the EVE talking to the Raspberry Pi. They suggest bridging CE1 to SS RFM12 and bridging G21/G27 to the third pin of the chip which appears to be FSK/DATA/nFFS (according to the data sheets I’ve seen)- oh and don’t forget to add an antenna!

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A few small updates as I have a ton of projects on the go at the moment.

FreeNas 8

After a friend visited earlier in the week I decided to give FreeNas / ZFS another shot- so I’ve installed the latest v8 on a spare HP Microserver N36L. The little cube has 4x 1.5TB Samsung disks in RAID-Z with a single 4GB stick of RAM. I have ordered another stick of RAM and a low profile, dual-port, gigabit pci-e network interface card (nic)- the HP NC360T (intel chipset) so I can setup load-balancing/link aggregation/LACP. I starting copying some data off of the current production Microserver (WHS2011):

Performance seems average. I’d expect to see a bit of an improvement when the gigabit HP / Intel nics arrive.

New Orders :)

I have put my Cisco SGE2000P 24-Port Gigabit managed PoE switch up on eBay as it’s a bit too big and loud for the small data/comms cabinet I bought recently. As a replacement I have ordered the D-Link DGS-1224TP which appears to offer the same feature set at half the size and half the weight (I think it may also be passively cooled and is touted as being "green" so hopefully help with the leccy bill :)

I also have a few Sonos S5 network wireless hifis on order (they were on special offer and I’ve been looking at whole house / multi-room audio distribution solutions for a while). I have a slight concern I may need to buy some Apple AirPort Express access points to enable AirPlay on them but I’ll cross that bridge as/when…